


Self

by citrusella



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: (also Steven's mom in the AU, (well okay not all the time, Alternate Universe, Angst, Childhood Memories, Connieswap, Gen, I Tried, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Identity Issues, Slice of Life, but significant writing sessions for this DID press up against my bedtime XP), which I didn't tag as original character because she's not MY original character)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-10-29 01:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10843554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citrusella/pseuds/citrusella
Summary: In the Connie Swap AU, Steven considers his identity and place in his family, community, culture, and himself. For a kid who at least tries to be all sunshine and rainbows, this isn't exactly the most fun thing to do, but sometimes it's necessary.Set in theConnieswap AU(but not affiliated with it)





	1. Self

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I've been me my whole life and somehow I still don't know what that means."
> 
> Steven frets over the way he feels about different parts of his identity, but not before having an exciting day of adventure and discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …Am I doing this? I'm doing this. This is set in the [Connie Swap AU](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/) (which you may want to [check out](http://archiveofourown.org/series/630527) before you read this, especially if you like background for what you read) and I'm terrified I'm doing it wrong.
> 
> Maybe not _wrong_ exactly, but this is the (slightly edited) product of about 20 different almost stream-of-consciousness sort of writing sessions that were all at really weird times of day while trying to recall several parts of a series I basically binge-read. And also trying to get a good feel for the characters I wrote about, which I'm not sure I did well enough. (I ended up filling the "blanks" of how to characterize them with situations I knew and what I feel _they'd_ do. Not sure if my conclusions were close to right.)
> 
> In addition, this chapter ended up WAY more intense in some ways than I originally planned on writing. :-/
> 
> ~~I wanted to do this so bad, but now I feel like I’m gonna throw up. _This is just like the teacups!_~~

Steven loved being at home. He was usually content and no serial worrier by any means, but he was glad there was a place where he didn't have to worry about not catching something, where he didn't have to worry about sounding right or potentially saying something wrong. Yep, he didn't have to worry about anything!

…That is, except his homework. There was plenty to worry about, there. He had an English assignment due Monday to research the layout of a news media source and use what he learned to influence a two-page mock newspaper or news site he would create over a topic of his own choosing. And if anyone had been in the room with him at this particular moment on this Friday afternoon, they'd recognize the cringing expression of a boy who had no ideas.

How was it that the king of rambling on about anything and everything couldn't think of a single topic for a project essentially all about rambling on?

He sniffed and got the laptop from the other room; might as well start now. He swung past the coffee table, placing his hearing aids gingerly on its surface—sometimes they could be itchy and noisy and just plain distracting—before he plopped himself onto the couch and cracked the laptop open.

Now, he wouldn't be Steven if he just… _started_ with his homework first! A mandatory browsing of TubeTube was in order, obviously. Not to watch anything, of course—Dad would ground him from TV (and by extension, TubeTube) again if he got too distracted by videos to do his homework—he'd just… y'know… mark some to watch later…

He was about halfway through this task when a loaf of bread plopped onto his keyboard, seemingly materializing from thin air and arriving, from Steven's current perspective, almost of its own volition. He jerked slightly and gasped sharply as a barely-suppressed startle fizzled through his body, and he looked up, wide-eyed, to find the source of the uninvited loaf.

His eyes landed on his mother, Mary, just in time to see her and a bag of groceries complete a trip to the ground, her attempt to catch her fall on the coffee table completely failing. The contents of the bag quickly spread themselves across the floor, a pickle jar at the bottom having broken on impact and now soaking the floor below the bag.

He stared in awe for a short moment before reaching for his hearing aids, more out of habit than a specific need for them in this situation, only to realize they weren't there. …They weren't there? But—!

His eyes shot to the groceries as he knelt swiftly at the edge of the pile, the fact his pant legs were getting wet going completely unnoticed. He pushed the bag to the side, revealing the two objects of his search sitting directly at ground zero for the spill, completely soaked in pickle juice.

For a shocked split second, all he and his mother could do was sit slack jawed, eyes flitting between each other and the ground, almost as if they were struggling to understand what had just happened. Mom's sense of urgency was the first between the two to resurface.

"Okay, I'm going to go clean these and situate them so they can dry out. You, uh, figure out what can be salvaged from… this." The words left her mouth quickly, her hands almost as fast, and she headed into the kitchen. Steven, to his end, began separating the food into two piles, being careful to avoid the shards littering the inside of the bag. Mom, having made quick work of getting the pickle juice off the outsides and separating as many parts of the aids as possible to speed them in airing out, returned to help her son move the usable food to the kitchen and throw the rest away and then to mop up the remaining puddle in the living room floor.

Satisfied that their work was completed, they flopped onto the couch right as Greg walked in.

Sniffing, he said, "I hope that pickle smell's not dinner."

* * *

After a rousing explanation of what happened and a filling meal (unfortunately, both his parents vetoed the bits as dinner), he finally sat down to get his homework done.

He scrolled through the local news site he'd opted to check out, noting parts of its layout, when a headline caught his eye.

_Delmarva School for the Deaf Rallies behind Deaf Nominee for Board_

From the headline, he could sort of guess the content of the story, though the story's location was what had caused him to stop and look.

He'd spent a little time at the school when he was very little—they had state-of-the-art sign instruction and speech therapy programs, so why not?—but tour constraints and a desire to try other methods—homeschooling, other deaf schools, deaf programs in hearing schools, and so on—had led his parents to pull him out of the bilingual-bicultural state school. Nowadays he went to a plain old neighborhood school, though he had an interpreter as backup, in case his hearing aids weren't enough, or…

Hmm. He wondered what would happen if his hearing aids weren't dry or working by Monday. He'd gone to school without them before, but if it came to it, this would be the first time at this school, with this interpreter… even with these specific hearing aids broken… hmm.

He turned his attention back to the story. As he'd thought, there were a few nominees for the deaf school's board seat, and the Deaf person the parents, teachers, and students from the school were rallying for was one of only a few Deaf people in the running. It was a good old-fashioned DPN. Except without the weeklong protests and the national support.

He wondered if he'd be the kind of person to organize a rally about this kind of thing if he had still been going to the deaf school. He wondered more about the whole process—how people were decided for these positions, how people heard about the decisions, how they planned rallies around them.

He wondered if he could go.

His interest in the situation got the better of him and he forgot his homework entirely as he dove deeper into information about what was happening. It was only when he realized two hours later that it was bedtime and he'd gotten very little done that his breath hitched, because if tonight was indicative of his whole weekend, he'd have nothing to show on Monday!

He hoped a little sleep would get him in the right frame of mind for this…

* * *

Steven laughed as he shot through the sky by Dogcopter's side. The dog helicopter cop had specifically invited him, out of hundreds of choices, to be his sidekick. After a long day of crimefighting, the two settled down for a heart-to-heart over a game of checkers.

"…So, Dogcopter. I've been meaning to ask: Why did you pick me to be your sidekick? I'm not special. There are so many people who would've made better picks. Like… oh! My friend Connie! She's got these magical gem powers and she's so talented—"

"Don't focus so much on talent, Steven. The real strength of a superhero/sidekick duo is all about communication. It's a conversation."

"But… I can't even do my homework right. All I did last night was get lost in an article about this rally and just… how can I be a good sidekick if I don't have any powers and don't do my homework and just do what I want instead of focusing on what I need to do? I'm not good at anything."

"Don't worry about labels or conforming to a standard. Every choice you make is a statement. Just be true to yourself, and people will appreciate your honesty."

Steven, stunned at the frank statement from the hero, could only stand and watch in awe as the dog launched into the sky for another patrol.

* * *

Steven woke abruptly to the shaking of his alarm clock, Dogcopter's conversation with him fresh in his mind. He quickly threw on clothes and headed downstairs to breakfast. He watched his parents talk about all the cool music and renovation stuff they'd be doing today as he thought deeper about the rally and his assignment. Just as they asked about his plans for the day, he knew just how to make the two fit together.

"I'm going to a political protest," he grinned.

His parents' eyebrows rose, taken aback but wanting to be supportive. "Oh? What for?" Mom asked.

"Equal representation in academic decision-making!" he replied, his left hand raised into a fist in front of his chest as stars formed in his eyes.

Greg chuckled and took a sip of orange juice. "That seems oddly specific. Care to elaborate?"

"Well, yesterday when I was reading for my homework I saw this story about how there's this board position open at the school for the deaf, and the people at the school are throwing this rally because they want this Deaf guy to get the position because right now the board is mostly hearing people and they want someone who has experience being deaf, y'know, and I thought it'd be interesting to go check it out and then maybe make my newspaper project about deaf stuff because, like, it's something I know and they always say 'write what you know' and also Dogcopter told me—"

His mom raised her hand, waving it a bit to get enough of his attention to get him to stop—if he got into that Dogcopter bit, they knew he'd never be finished with the ramble. His parents, smiling at his clear enthusiasm, still shared an unsure glance; it sounded like a lot of work.

"That sounds like a lot of work, and I'm not sure how much we'd be able to help, you know?"

"Are you sure you're up for it? You only have two days."

"Yeah, maybe if you did something closer to home, like maybe music or the beach or something, you'd have more time to get everything done and maybe we'd be able to help you more."

Steven hesitated. It seemed like whenever his parents weren't sure he could do something without their help, they defaulted to making it about music. After a few moments of silence, he managed to come up with a response. "Everyone will be doing the beach. It's too easy!"

"Huh. I guess you're not wrong. But it's a long commute if you're going to that rally; you can't just… decide to go, especially alone. We just want to make sure you're committed, that you think you'll get it done. That's all."

Steven was still for a long moment, wondering if he would, in fact, have the time to finish this with just two days and all the work he wanted to put in.

_Just be true to yourself, and people will appreciate your honesty._

"…Yes, I can. This is definitely what I wanna do," he nodded.

Mary and Greg smiled slyly to each other, and Greg took out his carabiner, spinning it on his finger for a moment.

"Well, if we're doing this, then I'll suppose you'll need a ride," Greg smirked. "And we'll need to get going soon."

That was all the push Steven needed to scarf down his cereal and drink his juice in record time. They were hitting the road!

* * *

Steven cracked the door open and stretched his legs. His parents weren't lying about the commute; it'd taken them close to an hour to get to their destination!

He looked out at the open space before the sprawling building. Even without his hearing aids, he could tell it was loud; it just had that sort of air. A bustling crowd filled the lawn, people scattered in every direction. Some were holding signs, many were simply conversing with each other, there was someone on a raised platform who looked like they were performing something, and on the fringes, there appeared to be two groups clashing and yelling at each other.

…Maybe best to stay away from that area unless the situation demanded it.

He looked to his dad. Mom had stayed home because she was expecting someone to come do some renovation work on the house. "Rally time?" Greg asked.

"Investigative journalism time!" he replied, putting on his most intense air.

Dad snorted. "Oh, boy, we're doing this! You sure people will put up with you investigating their journals?"

Steven laughed. "Can't hurt to ask!"

"Might hurt to ask _them_." Greg pointed to the clashing groups, looking suddenly unsure about the whole choice of coming out here at all.

"Ah, I'm sure they're nice… when they're not… uh… yelling." Steven stood still, surveyed the area for a moment, and then, without warning, ran off to find someone willing to put up with him.

Greg stood in place for a moment, feeling somewhere between immensely proud and intensely nervous, before he waded through the fray to follow his son.

* * *

Steven settled himself at the desk, mentally debriefing from the trip.

He'd talked to a few people (even some people from the yell-y group!) and gotten some excellent stuff to use for his paper. All in all, they spent a few hours there and then headed home, stopping at the Buddy Buddwick Library for some books for his project.

…And somehow, it still felt like he had nothing! Stupid, useless brain!

He sighed. Washed up at 14. So sad.

Leaning back in the chair, he looked at the clock. 3:42. Not too late to maybe… get some help? He mulled over that option.

Steven shut the laptop and shoved it, his notes, and the books he'd checked out into his cheeseburger backpack.

It was time for a trip to a certain half-gem's house.

* * *

Steven sped over to Connie's house as fast as his feet could take him—well, as long as you didn't count the dawdling he did at the Big Donut picking up snacks while he waited for Connie to answer his text. He couldn't head to her house only to find she was out on a magical adventure or something!

When he arrived, Connie was there to greet him at the door. "So you said you had something to tell me about your homework?"

Steven looked to her and wiggled his ear, less an "I need help" and more a "look at what's not on my ear, remember?" but serving the purpose of both.

"Oh! Right, you told me about the pickle incident in the text!" Multiple texts, really. It seemed even the limits of SMS were no match for the rambly nature of Steven Universe.

She idly wondered if she should bring up a force field and breathe onto it, but—while it was admittedly cool—the rational part of her knew the pad and paper on the counter would do just as well with less work.

_"I'm sure I could have gotten Lapis to dry your hearing aids if you'd brought them."_

Steven facepalmed, replying, "I didn't think of that! I was too busy thinking about my project! To be honest, though, it probably doesn't matter much, anyway; the insides are probably almost dry on their own by now."

_"What's with this project, anyway? You said it had something to do with a newspaper?"_

"Yeah, I have to make a pretend newspaper about a topic I really care about, and I figured out overnight that I wanted to make it about deaf stuff since, like..." he gestured to his ears.

_"Cool, so you have a topic. What's the problem?"_

"Well…"

He related the whole thing to her: the struggle figuring out what to do for the assignment, the article, the Dogcopter dream, convincing his parents to take him, the groups at the rally, the teacher who seemed almost _too_ eager to let him know their opinions, the student his age who'd jokingly asked if he was a cop before "submitting herself for questioning" (hmm, she was nice; he kind of wished he'd had more time to talk to her), a boy who'd gotten on the platform erected onsite and performed a poem, the guy in the yell-y group who refused to write back and forth with him (but he'd gotten a jist of the guy's opinion from the interaction alone), another guy in that group, a guy fighting with that group, a representative for the governor who'd showed up to observe the rally—

Connie had to stop him before he started detailing every tree he'd seen on the ride home.

 _"That all sounds really interesting! Wish I could've been there! But it sounds like maybe you have,"_ she paused, tapping the pen against her lips, _"so much stuff it won't fit in the paper."_

Steven studied this possibility. "Maybe? But it feels like I still don't have anything to write about, even with all the great stuff I heard and learned at the rally."

Connie placed her hand to her chin. "Hmm… oh!" She wrote her next message quickly, almost haphazardly. _" ~~Maybe~~ ~~Have you thought~~ Do you have any other stories besides the rally thing?"_

Steven was silent for a few moments before having a minor outburst. "Ah! I don't!" Of course! One article, no matter how good, did not a newspaper make! "But what else could I put? I mean, I checked out some books from the library, but that was to talk about the background history stuff that would lead to something like the rally. M—Maybe I can use those to make a 'special feature' sort of thing on history? Or something?"

 _"Probably a good start, but maybe not enough. You could,"_ she thought to herself, _"fill some space with comics or jokes or something."_ She snickered to herself and wrote again.

 _"Or maybe I could help and be a disgruntled newspaper patron writing a petty letter to the editor about,"_ she tapped her pen on the page as she tried to determine an appropriate topic that fit with the newspaper's subject, _"I'm not sure, maybe that time a few weeks ago your hearing aid wasn't all the way in and it was sort of doing this whistly feedback sort of sound?"_

He had people tell him about feedback often enough that he wasn’t sure he remembered that specific time but replied nevertheless. "Come on, it couldn't have been that bad."

_"I didn't have a problem with it, personally, but it drove Peridot *nuts*. She kept shouting that the thing was annoying and then called it defective and you almost thought she was talking about you, remember?"_

…Oh, that time. He'd valiantly defended himself until Peridot clarified (though he'd had to continue defending himself after because then they got into a debate about whether or not he was defective, too)… but he'd be lying to himself if he didn't admit that sometimes he actually did feel that way.

His lips pursed. Most of the time, he thought he was fine being himself, interacting with anyone (deaf, hearing, or anything in between) as if he were standing with one foot in each "water", as it were… but when that confidence faltered… it was as if he'd been thrown into the deep end of a poisoned pool and forgotten how to swim—he didn't know where he belonged, if he belonged at all.

He was the deaf son of two musicians, a whole musical family who had started out with no idea how to deal with him, and no amount of Deaf community or culture—which was hard to get in little Beach City anyway, and where he also wasn't completely sure he belonged—would completely stop him from sometimes feeling the effects of that. Some deaf people were very talented with music, some were professional musicians even, but he certainly wasn't one of them, and it seemed to him sometimes that his parents wished that was different.

Even this morning, they'd tried to push him away from using deafness as a paper topic, and though he knew a lot of it _was_ because of the travel involved in the rally part, he wondered if part of it was that they still wanted that music link and were scared if he explored his "Deaf side" too much, they'd risk losing it. He knew his parents would never deliberately try to make him feel bad about that part of himself, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen anyway, even if it was on accident, even if they didn't realize they were doing it. They were only human.

Human.

He looked to Connie, who was now looking expectantly at him, awaiting an answer for the last thing she'd written him. She was half-human, half-gem. He wondered if she ever felt… No, maybe it was different. She had a magical destiny, after all.

He opened his mouth and shut it a few times, unsure how or even if he should ask. Finally, it tumbled out of his mouth like it had a mind of his own, as if broken free from being held against its will in a pearly white cage.

"Um… can I ask sort of a weird question?"

Connie nodded cautiously, curiosity as to how weird a newspaper question could get clearly etched on her face.

"Ah… do you ever feel… um… like you… don'tknowwhereyoubelong?" He blushed as the words at the end of the sentence somersaulted out of his mouth so quickly it was a wonder they weren't unintelligible.

Taken aback, Connie blinked a few times. That certainly wasn't the kind of question she was expecting! She placed her hand to her chest, her brow furrowed—not out of confusion over the question, because she very definitely knew the answer, but out of confusion as to where on earth—no, in the universe—that had come from. He'd been ambivalent about his assignment, but this… this was a whole other level.

She gave a single solemn nod and began to quickly but neatly scrawl a more detailed answer on the pad of paper.

 _"Not always, but yeah. I think sometimes Jasper, Peridot, and Lapis don't quite know how to treat me. My dad, either. They all have experience with one or the other, but I'm the first 'both'. If that makes sense."_ She stopped to let Steven read it, then considered taking back the pad to ask him where this was coming from. As Steven's mouth opened for a reply, she hesitated, but his lips clamped shut without a word almost as soon as she'd backed off.

His eyes scanned the room and it was clear from his face that he was in deep thought. It was a few minutes before he spoke again.

"I…" A pregnant pause. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up. It's a little heavy. I just… I… think the problem doesn't have anything to do with how much material I have. I'm sure—especially with your help—we could come up with enough stuff to fill a paper by Monday. …I, um, I think the problem is me."

"What—" The paper. _"What do you mean? Why would you be the problem?"_

"I don't really know what I am. I mean, I know what I am, of course, but I've never really put thought into… I dunno… what that means. You know, like, what I want for myself, what I think about certain things, what other people think of it—not that I think I have to care about what other people think, it's just..."

He took a breath. "My parents both love music, but…" His hand hovered in the air and made vague aimless motions, a sort of visual "um" as if the English words he wanted next would come more quickly if he searched his mind in both languages. "I guess in a way, I'm their version of 'both'. I mean, not an _actual_ 'both' like you are, just… I'm the only deaf person in my family, and… I dunno. My parents do their best, even when they're not sure what to do, and I know they'd love me no matter what, but I wonder how much they kind of wanted me to turn out… different, you know. More like them or something."

"I'm not even sure why I'm thinking so much about this _now_. I mean, I started thinking about it when you mentioned the thing with Peridot," Connie grimaced, sorry for bringing up the memory, though her guilt softened with his next words, "but I feel like that's not all of it. Maybe it's the incident with my hearing aids, maybe it's the rally, maybe it's just stress or something... I dunno."

He sighed.

"I've been me my whole life and somehow I still don't know what that means."

Connie nodded, understanding the sort of feeling of trying to find your place in what felt like an endless puzzle, but she said nothing—it felt almost like there was nothing _to_ say to that.

Steven sniffed and spoke again. "I'm sorry. I kind of made this a downer kind of thing, when I just said I wanted to come over and maybe get help with my newspaper thing. Maybe I should just go."

Connie's entire body language shifted at that—her hands waved and her head shook as if to say "no, no!" She took the pad once more.

_"No! It's fine, plus it was kind of a newspaper question if you think about it! And I said I'd help, so I think you should stay. Besides, you're allowed to have an identity crisis; I think I heard someone say once that that's a teenager thing. Even if in your case, it's also a deaf thing."_

Steven smiled softly as he read Connie's message, still not sold on whether he could stay for the help on the paper. "Maybe… but how can you help me with a paper I'm not even sure I can write right?"

She thought deeply for a moment _"Maybe you don't need help to write the paper. Maybe,"_ she thought again for another few seconds, _"the paper needs help to write you?"_

Steven's brow furrowed, and he handed the pad back to Connie, an invitation for clarification.

_"What I mean is maybe writing the paper will help you with all the stuff you're thinking about. Maybe since you don't feel like you know yourself like this, that's why it feels like you don't have anything. You could think about the stuff you're writing about and come up with your own take on it. Maybe writing about it will help you figure out how you feel about it. And then you'll know yourself better and know how to make sure you've got enough stuff for the paper."_

He read her message, nodding as his mouth cracked open into a grin. "Yeah, maybe the solution isn't being upset I'm thinking about this so much, it's… thinking about it more?" He glanced slyly toward Connie, who giggled slightly and took the pad back.

 _"If you brought your stuff, I'd be happy to try to help, if I can. Especially if you still need that letter to the editor."_ She smirked. _  
_

Steven smiled and unzipped his backpack. Time to get to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's the end. I feel like maybe there was something more I wanted to add, but I think my brain just gave out on putting more words in this story. It's ten pages long in my word processor, by far the longest oneshot I've ever written. Not sure how I like it (it's one of the more difficult things I've written recently, and it's more angsty (and more focused on his HOH/deafness) than the original fluffy idea I had… but on the other hand, it's orders of magnitude better than the original draft I had to basically trash), but I did it. I finished it. XP
> 
> Also, I think the Stevenbomb started to affect how I wrote as I neared the end, even if it didn't fully affect _what_ I wrote. DX (Around the time I started writing the going-over-to-Connie's-house bit all the spoilery stuff about the bomb (plus the episodes themselves, eventually) was coming out, so something's making me think Steven's angst in some of the bomb leaked into my story. :-/)
> 
> (Maybe I'll revise/rewrite it sometime if I can figure out what exactly I'm thinking is "wrong" with it. *shrug* Unless the thing I'm thinking is basically the entire story in which case tough luck for me. XP ~~Maybe episode 6 of the AU will shed some light on things, too, since I think part of my problem was I didn't have a strong enough "feel" for some of the characters (namely Steven's parents, particularly his mom), and that episode is about New Year's being celebrated at Steven's house. *shrug*~~ )
> 
> And one more thing: I credited the Connie Swap AU in the lead note, but I feel like I should give [Gem Swap](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10580706/chapters/23382729) by timeisweird a shout-out as well, since they're how I was introduced to this AU in the first place.
> 
> ~~Also I'm still technically on a writing hiatus for just a while longer because job search but this story wouldn't let me NOT write it and also the impending Stevenbomb was already distracting me (even though it hadn't come out yet when I started writing _shh_ ) so~~


	2. Growth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Things sure were different then."
> 
> Memories are brought to light during a night of leafing through photographs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look, I've written another chapter for this thing I said was gonna be a oneshot! I might add more chapters to this randomly, but I think it'll always be marked "complete" unless I _know_ I have to add another chapter to, say, tie something up.
> 
> I actually wrote a high-angst chapter before I wrote this one but then I got sad because of the angst so I had to write this one. There's still a little angst in this chapter, but this is way less hardcore in the angst department than the chapter I would have put here.
> 
> As a preface, I don't presume to know exactly how brass sounds are made or taught; I played clarinet. (But I asked my brother and tried to use what he told me about trumpet playing, so…)
> 
> Also, in the second flashback, I tried to do something interesting and added mouseover tooltips (like you get if you hover over this chunk of text to some dialogue where I thought people might get confused as to whether the characters were signing or speaking if they just used the "dialogue words" (I personally think I was adequately (though not perfectly) clear with the actual text for the purposes of the story, but I wanted to play around with that extra layer/the code anyway, so it's a good "just in case"). I'm a fan of being vague sometimes to let the reader fill in what they see in the situation, so they're more suggestions/how I saw it than something you absolutely have to pay attention to, but they're there.
> 
> If you're, say, using a screen reader or something and for some reason the spans, like, break the text (or otherwise make the story inaccessible to you), please let me know. I was trying to find an all-around good HTML element to mess with and couldn't find one. XP

Steven sat on the living room floor and thumbed idly through a stack of pictures he'd removed from a box. They'd had little time or space to keep their pictures anywhere but in a large box while they were bouncing around, but now that they'd settled in Beach City, they were pulling them all out to find the perfect ones for a photo album. Or several photo albums, as it were.

"Hey, look at this!" Mary exclaimed, spreading a plethora of photos across the floor in front of Greg and Steven.

"Oh, wow, blast from the past!" Greg said, picking up a shot of a younger him holding an infant boy. "Look, it's proof my hairline wasn't always receding," he joked as he showed the picture to Steven.

Steven laughed heartily and examined the pile closely. "Hey, are these all me?"

"Looks like it," his mother chuckled.

Steven dug inquisitively through the sprawl of photos, stopping when he spied the image of a small boy squatting in front of a seagull, the back of his hand at his chin as his pointer finger and thumb mimicked a bird's beak.

"Well, that brings back memories," Dad mentioned wistfully.

"It does?" Steven took another look at the image. Even knowing it was of him, he couldn't bring anything about the moment to mind, himself. Granted, he looked no more than… maybe three, so it was understandable.

"Sure does," his mother answered, adding, "That was the first time you'd signed 'bird' so clearly."

"I'd never done it before?" He stole a glance at the snapshot, wondering how many other "first words" they could have captured on film.

"No, you had, just not like that…"

* * *

The soft beach sand gave easily under the foot of the rambunctious toddler bounding across its surface and skittering through the shallow tidal waves.

His parents lay under an umbrella on a towel some feet away. They kept perhaps a more watchful eye on him than they might have given to another toddler as the child ran alternately toward the water as it receded toward the ocean and back toward them as a gentle wave brought more water onto the wet sand.

Sans his hearing aids—the beach, with its surf and sand, was much too perilous a place even without factoring in the bouncy two-and-a-half year old who still sometimes took them out and chewed on them—and clad in an almost-too-big pair of swim trunks, he was a small dot that, perhaps in another circumstance, would have almost blended entirely into the shoreline. For now, though, one thing left him rather conspicuous—an extremely loud, high-pitched squeal that pierced the air every few minutes as the boy found a new thing to get excited about.

He didn't have very many spoken words yet, but the signed ones he had, especially coupled with the sound it wasn't entirely clear whether or not he knew he was making, were more than enough.

Daddy putting a large pair of sunglasses on his face as the boy giggled uncontrollably. "Same glasses!"

Finding a pretty seashell for Mommy. "Pretty, for Mommy."

"Thanks," Mommy signed, making sure to look extra enamored with her newfound gift.

Mommy and Daddy taking turns holding him in their arms as they jumped into deeper surf than he could go into on his own.

"More! More! More! More! More!"

He and Daddy built a sandcastle together as his hands babbled about all the people—real and imaginary—that should live inside, and then he decided that he was a big boy and could build a castle on his own, dragging his small pail and shovel away as his former building partner feigned upset at the loss of their joint architecture venture.

The tiny tot had settled, contented, hitting ~~a shapeless mound of sand~~ his sandcastle with the back of his shovel as he looked out at the seemingly never-ending ocean.

Suddenly, mere feet from the boy, a new friend landed! Almost as if in greeting, the boy squealed. The gull flew away, but he either didn't notice or didn't care as he ran to tell of this new encounter.

"Daddy, Mommy! Bird! There!" He signed "bird" backward, its "beak" facing his chin instead of away from it, but Mommy and Daddy paid it no mind, as they understood it anyway.

The two adults followed their kid to the place of the chance meeting and, finding no bird, they frowned as if very disappointed they couldn't meet whatever stranger had made their son this excited, too.

"Where's the bird?" Mommy asked, looking around quite seriously to see if they could find a new gull friend.

Daddy spotted a flock down the beach. "Maybe he went to meet some friends. Do we want to visit?"

The young child looked from one grown-up to the other quizzically before fixing his gaze down-beach where the flock was doing bird things. He broke into a run, and suddenly, his parents were scrambling to keep up, following the sound of his nonstop chortles as they chased his tiny form.

He stopped a few yards short of the group of gulls, oddly silent for such an excited little boy. His parents looked down, gauging him for any trace of reaction. He seemed to be studying the gulls from this distance, though for what reason wasn't quite clear to the two adults. A small squeak, barely audible over the sound of the waves, escaped from his mouth, its tone sounding like that of a renowned scientist discovering everything he knew was wrong.

Then, out of the blue, a frighteningly-loud—but clearly happy—screech broke the relative silence on the beach, scaring about half the gulls away in the process and causing his parents to collapse into peals of laughter. The youngster deciding a run through the gulls was just what they needed helped to scare away the other half.

All, that is, except one.

The bird was scarcely a foot away from him, and his parents, having calmed themselves, wondered in worried silence what he'd do. Neither of the small creatures moved until the toddler squatted, attempting to get on some semblance of eye level with the gull. He put the back of his hand to his chin as he mimicked a bird's mouth opening and closing.

"Mary, get the camera," Greg whispered.

"Already on it," she replied, having shoved it into her shorts when her son had initially dragged her to where they thought they'd find the gull. She snapped the picture, and no sooner had the image been burned onto film, the bird had taken its leave and flown away, though only just enough to keep her from getting a second shot of the duo. It still remained close, doing a little examining of its own on the boy who had been examining it.

"Looks like Steven made a friend."

* * *

 

"So… I used to do it like this," he faced the sign toward his face as he did it, "and then… that's when..?"

"You started doing it like this. Apparently something clicked and you realized you'd been doing it wrong all those months."

Steven smiled longingly, wishing he could remember what was to his parents an obviously happy memory. He placed the photo down with some other pictures they'd decided would be going into the album.

They rummaged through some other snapshots. A seven-month-old baby in a carrier wearing a face somewhere between wonder and disgust—his first time in hearing aids, he learned. A three year old wearing a too-large backpack—his first day of preschool at the deaf school. A five year old sitting at a table in what looked like an RV—his "first day of kindergarten" one of the times his parents had homeschooled him. Steven in a costume. Steven at a birthday. The obligatory bathtub picture every parent had of their children as babies—Steven quickly brushed that into a "definitely not" pile.

"Whoa, this is from your third grade recital, remember?" His mother held up an image of an eight year old him smiling sheepishly at the camera as he held up a French horn. A little girl the same age, with brown eyes and dark hair pulled into a nice braid, wore a toothy grin as she wrapped one arm around his shoulder, the other holding a trumpet.

Oh, he remembered. His entire class had all picked an instrument to learn and performed a few songs as part of a school-wide fundraising show. His parents seemed to be fondly remembering the performance, and to be honest, the recital itself wasn't that bad once he'd shaken off the stage fright and seen his proud parents in the front row.

But he had memories they didn't, memories of the difficult, long, sometimes embarrassing weeks of rehearsal for the show, and remembering those as he looked at the picture, the emotions he felt seemed a lot more nuanced than the ones his parents seemed to have about it.

* * *

Steven was _not_ looking forward to music class. It was Thursday, one day before he was supposed to have an instrument picked to practice for the big show in a month, and he had nothing!

He and Neimaat, a deaf girl in his class, had been allowed to come in yesterday after school to have more time to try instruments, but even that hadn't brought him any closer to a choice. He'd tried the glockenspiel, cymbals, clarinet and French horn with varying levels of success—all while the teacher, well-meaning but perhaps a bit blunt, tutted about his imperfect tonguing, airflow, and mouth shape.

If he'd known learning to play a wind instrument was this much like speech therapy, he might have just decided to go there instead. He'd ended up leaving that afternoon more unsure than when he'd started.

Now, he entered the music room a few minutes before class was to start to find a note on his chair. He sat, unfolding it to be greeted with the message, _"I think you'd like the bongos! – Miss Ta"_

He looked toward the collection of instruments at the front of the class, but he didn't get very much time to consider the suggestion before hearing a familiar cackle from behind him. He told himself not to turn around—he knew what he'd find if he did—but at the same time, he was unable to keep from whipping around in his seat, an act which brought him face to face with Mae Cupp, the meanest girl in class, flanked on either side with members of her clique.

"Hey, guys, looks like Stupid Stevie can't even pick an instrument on his own!" she and her cronies laughed. "I bet you're so dumb you can't even play a drum right!"

Neimaat arrived at her seat beside Steven and scowled, "Shut up, Mae."

"Oh, look, Stevie's little girlfriend's coming to stick up for him since he's too stupid to do it himself!"

"…I'm older than you, Mae. And taller."

"I'm older than you, Mae!" the girls mocked.

"Oh, that's a great comeback!" Neimaat spoke sardonically before asking more seriously, "Why are you such a buttface?"

Steven turned back around, taking his hearing aids out and shoving them in his pocket to completely avoid hearing any more of the heated exchange going on behind him. He crossed his arms on the surface of his desk and placed his head down, his ears hot and his face beet red as he fought back tears. Class couldn't end fast enough.

Miss Ta did a double take at his dejected form as she entered the room, but she didn't seem to scold anyone, so the back-and-forth behind him must have stopped. During class, she shot him a few concerned glances, and she seemed to spend a bit more time talking with Neimaat today, but she didn't make him try any new instruments, and for that, he was grateful. There was no way he'd play the bongos now.

As he fell behind the rest of the class in their exit from the room, a tap came on his shoulder. It was Neimaat, because of course it was.

"Are you okay?" she signed, walking alongside him.

Steven's glower was answer enough.

She continued, "We still have a few months left in third grade. If we listen to what she says for three whole months, we'll… well, we'll just end third grade really sad. So, maybe… don't listen to her?"

Steven returned her gaze with downcast eyes. Faced again with no response other than a long face, she had no choice but to keep on or shut up. And she wasn't one to shut up. But then, on a normal day, neither was Steven—the boy was known to talk at people for minutes at a time even if it was clear they had no idea what he was on about—so maybe the world was ending and eventually Neimaat would shut up. But "eventually" hadn't arrived yet, so she kept on.

"So… what instrument do you think you'll try next?"

"Why does it matter?"

"Why do you do that?!" Steven's eyes shot up as his friend's interjection, the two momentarily forgetting about heading to their destination. "Why do you just always give up on music before you can ever do anything?"

That sparked Steven's ire. "Because I'm not any good!"

"Because you don't try!"

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"You know what it means! You never give up on anything—your schoolwork, your after-school stuff, you even got the resource room teacher to agree to bring us ice cream last Friday, for Pete's sake!—but the second you're not immediately good at music, you just… stop!"

"My mom and dad do it for a living. What if I'm not as good as them?"

Her demeanor softened. "So you're not as good! I'm sure they had to practice to be good at music. And if you practice and you're not as good, then at least you'll know because you actually tried, not because you think something's going to happen but it hasn't yet."

"Easy for you to say. You have that nice recorder I saw you playing today."

"Yes," she deadpanned, "I'm going to pick the instrument that made me literally rip my ears off."

Steven brightened as he recalled her cringing as she played and then making a silly face toward him in an attempt to cheer him up as she pulled the coil of her cochlear implant off her head and tried again. Which reminded him, he should probably put his hearing aids back in before they got to the resource room.

Neimaat played with her braid as he put them back in and remarked, "I think I actually wanna try the trumpet some more. Maybe you should give the French horn another chance? Then we could be brass buddies!" She giggled. She had been semi-successful with her trumpet the previous afternoon—a stuttering _bwuh_ sound had bumped its way out of the bell, a stark contrast from the few errant toots Steven got out of his French horn, sounds so quiet it was almost entirely due to the teacher's feedback that he even knew he'd played anything.

"I'm still afraid I won't be good." He sighed.

Neimaat thought to herself. "Well… you know your parents would be proud of you, right?" He nodded. "Then that's all that matters. Besides, no one at this thing will be all that good. My brother was in the third grade part two years ago, and my dad says most of the audience is there to pretend their own kid is good and sit through everyone else their kid is just as bad as. Even if all you really figure out how to do is hold the horn so it looks pretty, you'll be better than at least five kids there. Maybe ten."

Steven snorted, relieved but still unsure.

"And you don't have to play the horn, either. Actually, maybe you don't want to because it is kind of hard. But if you do, I can try to help you. And then we can both blow it in Mae's face." She smiled smugly, and Steven's remaining upset about the situation melted away.

He paused, then smiled, nodded, and stuck out his hand. "…Brass buddies?" he spoke.

"Brass buddies!" She smiled, returning the handshake.

The two paused for a long moment.

"…Wait, aren't we supposed to be in the—?"

"Run!"

* * *

A nostalgic smile spread across his lips. The memory may not have been the happiest he had, but it hadn't been all that bad, especially as the concert had drawn nearer, and if he had to admit, it _was_ fun to shove their horns in Mae's face. He decided that he didn't mind his mom putting it in the pile for the album.

The three shuffled through more of the trove of photos, stopping every so often for a story or comment. One set of photos in particular, capturing the family at a Beethoven's Nightmare concert, drew delighted recounts of the night from everyone. They'd gone out of their way during one of their tours just to catch a show by the band, and they certainly hadn't regretted it.

Even though it had been a few years ago now, Steven's excitement—they were a band full of Deaf people! they signed! he needed to find out when there was another show with them right now and——was so much that his rambling account of the experience needed to be cut off prematurely if they wanted it to end _tonight_ and he had to be talked down from adding more than just a few shots from that experience to the album pile.

The group grew quiet as they sorted through a few more pictures. Minutes later, Greg nudged Mary.

"Hey, Starlight, look." She was silent for a few moments until a streak of realization went through her.

"…Oh… this is from… before we knew." Steven scooted toward the two and craned his neck to see a picture of a young baby—younger than any of his other pictures they'd found so far—lying asleep on a blanket, Mary behind him mid-strum on a ukulele.

"Things sure were different then," Greg remarked.

Steven sat in awkward silence for a moment, wanting to respond but not sure how. He pulled the casing of his hearing aid from behind his ear and pushed it back into its standard position, a nervous tic that, if nothing else, gave his hand something to do.

"…Different good or different bad?"

Mary blinked as if coming out of a trance, taking a pause not unlike Steven's to collect her thoughts.

"…Just… different." She went quiet again, trying to figure out how to best explain.

"Maybe… if you'd asked us then, we would have said finding out was bad… but… things were very… different, then."

Greg broke in to comment, "Yeah, we were young, we didn't know anyone like you—"

"—we got thrust into so much stuff, all these new concepts and words we had to change our understanding of—moderate, severe, profound, intervention—" her eyes let on that she was remembering more but she stopped herself there, "on top of trying to learn signs and stuff, it was almost like we were learning two languages!" She let out a reflective sort of huff, a kind of almost-laugh.

"And we still wanted to travel for music but it was hard to even consider trying to get back into it when there were all these… appointments and things and the people talking about how important it was to _start early_ and shoving everything under the sun at us—all the technology, therapies, education stuff—before we were even sure we'd processed what was going on. It was… overwhelming." Greg looked down.

"But then… there you were." As Mary related the words, Steven cocked an eyebrow, confused at his mother's statement.

"I mean, you were still you—hungry, tired, happy, excitable. Nothing was different for you; you were just the way you'd always been, even if everything changed for us. You know?"

"It was kind of like we got to know you all over again, but better." Greg rumpled his son's hair.

"So… in a way it was good, even if at first you thought it was bad."

"…Yeah, I guess that's a good way of putting it," Mary said, leaning to give her son a hug, Greg joining in as well.

It was very good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beach part of this story was probably inspired in spirit by something in the book _Deaf Like Me_ (which is itself a memoir, so by extension the girl's real life inspired it, oops). I didn't read it to get a feel for that scene, but I remember there being a beach scene in it that might have some resemblance to what I wrote.
> 
> Also just for fun, [here is an example of the "backwards"/wrong sign for bird](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbFznB2y6w&t=10m37s). It's not uncommon for a young child to aim a sign the wrong way when first learning it. XP (EDIT: The entire channel just... went down for no clear reason. I'll keep the link in for now in case it starts working again, but...)
> 
> In addition, Beethoven's Nightmare is [a real band](https://www.beethovensnightmare.com/about-us) made up entirely of deaf people. I considered coming up with a fake name in-chapter for them but couldn't come up with one that'd do them justice. :-/ So you get their real name in-chapter. (Also, they were supposed to be a third flashback, but I skipped that since a) I've never been to one of their performances and b) the chapter was already kind of long.)


End file.
